A Simple Idea to Give Iran’s Democrac Protesters a Boost

My latest Capital Journal column looks at a move in Congress to give a bit of help to Iranian democracy protesters:

Sometimes the smallest ideas can have the biggest impact. And so it may be in helping to push change in Iran.

Almost without notice, a small initiative to help democratic reformers in Iran is moving through the U.S. Congress. The notion is disarmingly simple: With a small investment of money, the U.S. government can help Iranian citizens get around efforts by the Iranian regime to block their use of the Internet to communicate with each other and the outside world.

The power of this idea became apparent amid the widespread anger in Iran over the country’s disputed presidential election this summer. After President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s re-election was announced, hundreds of thousands of Iranians took to the streets to protest the dubious circumstances, the largest showing of popular unrest since the 1979 Iranian revolution.

The most powerful tools the latest protesters had were the Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and text messages they could circulate to organize among themselves and to communicate to the outside world. And so the Iranian government, as part of a general campaign to suppress protest, stepped in to cut off or slow down the freedom marchers’ Internet access, and to monitor traffic as a way of ferreting out leaders.

Throughout the months since the election, the question perplexing U.S. policy makers has been whether and how America might encourage the reform movement in Iran, without being so heavy-handed as to make the protesters appear to be foreign stooges. That was the question a bipartisan group of senators and their staff members began brooding over during the summer.